The Eyrie Vineyards, McMinnville, Oregon -- Winemakers are in full harvest and production mode in Western Oregon as the current crop of grapes are the best in the past few growing seasons.

Photo: Bruce Ely, Special To The Chronicle

The Eyrie Vineyards, McMinnville, Oregon -- Winemakers are in full...

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Antica Terra Winery, Dundee, Oregon -- Winemakers, including Maggie Harrison, are in full harvest and production mode in Western Oregon as the current crop of grapes are the best in the past few growing seasons.

Antica Terra Winery, Dundee, Oregon -- Winemakers are in full harvest and production mode in Western Oregon as the current crop of grapes are the best in the past few growing seasons.

Photo: Bruce Ely

Antica Terra Winery, Dundee, Oregon -- Winemakers are in full...

Image 4 of 11

Antica Terra Winery, Dundee, Oregon -- Winemakers are in full harvest and production mode in Western Oregon as the current crop of grapes are the best in the past few growing seasons.

Photo: Bruce Ely, Special To The Chronicle

Antica Terra Winery, Dundee, Oregon -- Winemakers are in full...

Image 5 of 11

The Eyrie Vineyards, McMinnville, Oregon -- Winemakers, including Jason Lett, are in full harvest and production mode in Western Oregon as the current crop of grapes are the best in the past few growing seasons.

Photo: Bruce Ely, Special To The Chronicle

The Eyrie Vineyards, McMinnville, Oregon -- Winemakers, including...

Image 6 of 11

The Eyrie Vineyards, McMinnville, Oregon -- Winemakers are in full harvest and production mode in Western Oregon as the current crop of grapes are the best in the past few growing seasons.

Photo: Bruce Ely

The Eyrie Vineyards, McMinnville, Oregon -- Winemakers are in full...

Image 7 of 11

The Eyrie Vineyards, McMinnville, Oregon -- Winemakers are in full harvest and production mode in Western Oregon as the current crop of grapes are the best in the past few growing seasons.

Photo: Bruce Ely

The Eyrie Vineyards, McMinnville, Oregon -- Winemakers are in full...

Image 8 of 11

St. Innocent Winery, Salem, Oregon -- Winemakers, including Mark Vlossak, are in full harvest and production mode in Western Oregon as the current crop of grapes are the best in the past few growing seasons.

Photo: Bruce Ely, Special To The Chronicle

St. Innocent Winery, Salem, Oregon -- Winemakers, including Mark...

Image 9 of 11

St. Innocent Winery, Salem, Oregon -- A glass of St. Innocent pinot noir is poured in the tasting room. Winemakers are in full harvest and production mode in Western Oregon as the current crop of grapes are the best in the past few growing seasons.

Photo: Bruce Ely

St. Innocent Winery, Salem, Oregon -- A glass of St. Innocent pinot...

Image 10 of 11

St. Innocent Winery, Salem, Oregon -- Winemakers are in full harvest and production mode in Western Oregon as the current crop of grapes are the best in the past few growing seasons.

One generation in, the wine growers in Oregon's Willamette Valley are a confident lot.

They've just come through two exceptionally cool and protracted vintages. While these conditions in 2010 and 2011 caused nail-biting at harvest, especially for Pinot Noir, the resulting wines have been spectacular - structured, lucid and bracing, a clarion call of regional expression like no other vintages in Oregon's history.

Just 10 years ago, the valley's wines didn't inspire this degree of confidence. Everything from climate change to inexperience resulted in wines that veered either toward exceptional promise or maddening inconsistency.

Then came a glorious 2008 vintage, and with it a clarity emerged. Among new and old wineries alike, there is now a sense of Oregon-ness, a newfound fidelity to place that trumps the allure of ripeness or flash.

After the painstaking delineation of six new federally approved subregions and more than 40 years of ruminative growth, an identity that for decades was imminent now feels like a distinct and distinguished presence.

"I think we're finally making the sorts of wines that draw the tastemakers in," says Sam Tannahill of A to Z, Rex Hill and Francis Tannahill Wines, "that get people interested in where Oregon stands in the world. The pieces are finally in place."

In 1966, David Lett of Eyrie Vineyards first planted Pinot Noir vines in Willamette Valley, hoping he'd found a place that shared traits with his beloved Burgundy. Over the next quarter-century, hundreds of adventurous homesteaders followed, lured by the valley's beauty, by the region's correlations with the Côte d'Or and by the siren song of Pinot Noir.

In a good vintage, the wines seemed effortlessly graceful, beautifully perfumed and smartly expressive in a way that offered a clear contrast to more ample California bottlings.

Reputation fluctuations

But fluctuations in quality cut into Oregon's reputation. In some years, it seemed vintage got the better of the region, with heavy, muddled and overwrought flavors. This trial-and-error period dragged on as winemakers coped not only with the vagaries of climate, but with their own inexperience, and with Pinot Noir's merciless learning curve.

Then, as the 21st century arrived, vineyard practices improved as winemakers got a better handle on their specific locales. A culture of self-examination bore fruit, too. As early as 1980, many Oregon producers did their soul-searching collectively at the Steamboat Pinot Noir Conference, an annual winemakers-only gathering near Crater Lake.

In the past decade, a significant number of vintners shifted away from a heavier style, realizing it wasn't a sustainable path. It marked a change from the 1990s, when many Oregon producers achieved critical success with riper, gaudier styles rewarded by critics at such publications as the Wine Spectator and the Wine Advocate.

"I was looking to put a lot into the bottle," says Mark Vlossak of St. Innocent Winery, "I tried a lot of fancy-assed fermentation techniques, cold macerations, used a lot more wood. It took me a while, but I eventually realized that those things don't work for me. But until you try it and taste the results, you can't know that."

In turn, vintners embraced the bright, soil-inflected signature that the region bestows without strain, especially in 2008, 2010 and 2011. With a run like that, the wines are more distinctive than they've been in years.

"Now we finally have the luxury of saying, 'Yes, but that's not who we are,' " says David Adelsheim, whose wines are now made in a more attenuated style. " 'We're Oregon, and here's how we're different.' "

The most dramatic transformation may have come at Beaux Freres Winery, owned in part by none other than Wine Advocate owner Robert M. Parker Jr. Since 1992, the wines have been made by Mike Etzel, whose evolution as an estate grower and embrace of biodynamic farming have had a profound effect.

'Look-at-me'

"I used to want to make the most powerful, most muscular, look-at-me kind of wine," he says. "As I became more confident, I realized I was much more interested in making wines as an honest expression of a place and of a vintage."

Biodynamics had a hand in Josh Bergstrom's stylistic transformation as well. But so did his relationships with Portland chefs, who increasingly occupy a national spotlight for their regionally sensitive menus.

"When I was making bigger wines, my friends who were chefs wouldn't drink them," says Bergstrom. "I started to realize how our food scene is so married to the wines here, and vice versa. That's where I decided to focus. I wanted to be food driven, not fad and fashion driven."

For years, Willamette Valley touted its natural affinities with Burgundy, where Pinot Noir and Chardonnay excel, a place at nearly the same latitude and with a comparable cool climate, although the soils aren't comparable at all. Dozens of Oregon winemakers have worked in Burgundian cellars. And French roots have been in Oregon for more than two decades, in the form of Domaine Drouhin Oregon, the venerable French house whose 1987 purchase of vineyard land in the Dundee Hills was a powerful validating statement for the region and inspired many French winemakers to work in Oregon.

But none to date has possessed the star power of Dominique Lafon of Domaine des Comte Lafon, who was hired in 2005 to consult for Evening Land Vineyards, an ambitious wine project on two continents and four locales that now leases the respected Seven Springs Vineyard. Evidently, Lafon's enthusiasm is infectious. Other top colleagues are reportedly exploring the valley, including Christophe Roumier and Jean-Nicolas Méo.

Quiet elegance

Domaine Drouhin Oregon, meanwhile, has thrived in a decidedly unassuming fashion. Veronique Drouhin never made flashy wines, but the winery's quiet elegance gets more pronounced with each vintage.

"The family is very clear about its sense of purpose," says David Millman, the winery's managing director. "They trust in the process that if you farm better, and get to know your property better every year, that somewhere down the road, as your vines get older, the wines will inevitably improve over time. But this is a multigenerational view. You'll never really get to see the full potential of the property. That will be left to the next generation."

That next generation in Oregon includes many who inherited the winemaking mantle from their parents: Alex and Alison Sokol Blosser, Luisa Ponzi, Wynne Peterson-Nedry, Jason Lett and many more. They have learned to embrace transplants from not only France, but California, including Maggie Harrison (Antica Terra) and Erin Nuccio (Haden Fig, Evesham Wood) and even those who expanded to distilling, like Ransom's Tad Seestedt, who not only makes wine, but grappa, brandy, gin and whiskey.

Oregon-ness, then, includes these far-flung elements, bringing a new energy to the state's 40-year wine history and its strong sense of identity.

"Of course I draw on the traditions of the area," says Harrison, a fairly recent transplant from California's Central Coast, where she made wine with Manfred Krankl at Sine Qua Non. "I'm reliant on everyone before me to help me understand where I am. But I'm not beholden. I can be more experimental and get my arms around all kinds of things and find my own way."